Due to the Lunar New Year holiday, from Saturday, Jan. 21, through Sunday, Jan. 29, there will be no Features pages. The paper returns to its usual format on Monday, Jan. 30, when Features will also be resumed. Kung Hsi Fa Tsai!
It is perhaps fitting that Tainan, the political and economic center of activity on Taiwan for over two centuries, is now the site of a museum telling the story of the nation’s human history. Starting in prehistoric times, Taiwan has been a center for trade. This and the ensuing power struggles among the indigenous, Europeans, Japanese and Chinese are presented in fascinating detail at the National Museum of Taiwan History. Children will enjoy the hands-on activities, the virtual train ride and the outdoor grounds, which include a large lawn and fish pond. Those without a strong interest in history will still be captivated by the gorgeous life-size mock-ups of historical living and working spaces, as well as the variety of peculiar artifacts, many of which have been donated by Taiwanese themselves. And for those who’d really like to delve into the fascinating story of Taiwan’s development, there is enough to keep one busy for an entire day. Overall, what this museum does best is present the story of the people who have made their home on Taiwan from an insider’s perspective. With the help of walk-in dioramas, interactive exhibits where visitors have to imagine themselves in the past and artifacts that represent the unique experience of certain individuals, visitors learn about Taiwan’s past in a way that is at once highly subjective yet not overly biased. ARTIFACTS The museum includes prehistoric archaeological finds. Their ability to paint a picture of life in these times is limited, but the distant source of some artifacts tells us people then still had an awareness of life beyond these shores. Moving into the historical period, there are items that demonstrate that interactions between indigenous people, Han settlers, Japanese merchants and Dutch colonizers were not as simple as oppressed vs oppressors, and that people then had conflicting loyalties that
When an elderly man with dementia started wandering off from his Singapore home, often walking miles before being found, his carers were at a loss over how to keep track of him — until a tech firm suggested fitting him with a wearable GPS tag. Carers also placed motion sensors in the 74-year-old’s flat and a CCTV camera at its doorway so they could monitor him from a distance. The public housing building has a further six CCTVs in the common areas to watch over its senior residents. “We have more peace of mind since we installed these, as we can more easily watch over them and get to them quickly in case they have a fall or wander off,” said a volunteer carer who asked not to be named, as she is not authorized to speak to the media. Similar monitoring technologies are becoming increasingly common in Singapore and other Asian nations with rapidly aging populations. Backers say it helps keep vulnerable older people safe, while technology experts say it is intrusive and opens the door to data breaches. “The issue with a lot of tech for seniors is that they are installed to ‘keep an eye’ on them, so they may feel they are being watched, and the control they have over their privacy is being taken away,” said Han Ei Chew, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore. “We also need to keep a very close eye on data security and privacy issues, and prevent situations where the technology is being used to spy on seniors, and ensure that the data are not commercially exploited,” added Chew, whose work focuses on technology and social issues. The use of video “is meant to reduce the burden on healthcare workers,” said Malou Toft, Asia-Pacific vice president at Milestone Systems, a video management software
Sustainable influencer Masego Morgan was shocked when a fast fashion giant offered her US$1,000 for a single social media post to promote its brand. Not only had the South African social media star never been offered that kind of money, the company represents exactly what she is against: overconsumption of cheap, planet-harming clothing made by underpaid workers. And she’s not alone. Former Love Island contestant and sustainable fashion influencer Brett Staniland said he was offered close to US$5,500 for a post for a major fast fashion brand, the kind of money most small or sustainable brands simply can’t compete with. Content creators like Morgan and Staniland are promoting sustainable fashion online, where fast fashion corporations with deep pockets have helped flood Instagram, TikTok and YouTube with sponsored posts encouraging viewers to buy more stuff — largely at the expense of the planet. This growing army of influencers are seeking to expose the environmental damage caused by huge fashion firms like Shein, H&M and Zara. They also encourage climate-conscious fashion choices — what Morgan calls “mindful consumption” — asking people to buy less, or if you do have to buy, best if it’s second-hand or ultra-sustainable. “We shouldn’t necessarily compete with (fast fashion) in their way... their model is already unsustainable,” said Morgan, whose TikTok and Instagram pages are full of playful posts bursting with upcycled and handmade items, many of which she features more than once. ‘MENDING IS REVOLUTIONARY’ Morgan started borrowing thrifted clothes from her stylish Japanese mother, who used to tell her that “mending is a revolutionary act,” and encouraged her to repair clothes instead of buying new ones. The 26-year-old, who posts much of her content from her Cape Town kitchen, said she tries to hold corporations to account instead of making people feel guilty about their choices. Influencers like
Chock full of language puns, cultural references and so many celebrity cameos that a few had to be shown in a mid-credits “deleted scenes” sequence, one needs to be quite ingrained into local life to fully understand U Motherbaker: The Movie (我的婆婆怎麼把OO搞丟了). There were many bits that went over my head, but the plot is so fast paced and rowdy that it didn’t affect the overall enjoyment of the film. Hyper-locality is exactly what this bawdy yet heart-warming screwball comedy aims for, though, as typical of Hoklo-language (also known as Taiwanese) films screened during the Lunar New Year break. They’re not meant to be taken seriously nor win awards. There was a time when the snob in me looked down on these productions, but they’re actually fun to watch and are easier to sit through than some of those slow-burning arthouse dramas of gloom and despair. For foreign residents, it’s a curious window into Taiwanese pop culture and what’s funny for the masses, even if you don’t quite get what’s going on. What keeps surprising me is the solid plots that drive the silliness, as mentioned in my review for Hanky Panky (大釣哥, Jan. 19, 2017). There’s nothing groundbreaking or any mind-bending twists, but there are almost no plot holes and the multiple storylines are resolved neatly in a way that makes sense. Sometimes, it’s better not to try too hard. U Motherbaker is based on the wildly popular 2020 television series of the same name, starring the beloved traditional bakery matriarch Tsai-hsiang (Chung Hsin-ling, 鍾欣凌). I did not watch the series, but it’s immediately understable why the Tsai-hsiang character is so appealing and won Chung a Golden Bell for best actress in a television drama. She’s loud, overly dramatic, scatterbrained and often conniving, but also self-deprecating, caring and innocent, serving
India’s highest court will hear arguments on whether to legalize same-sex marriage on March 13, a landmark for the country of 1.4 billion people and for the global movement for LGBTQ rights. A ruling that finds gay marriages are allowed under India’s constitution would run counter to the socially conservative sentiment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, as well as wide swaths of the country’s Muslim community. But younger Indians tend to be more accepting, and absent any intervention from Parliament, the court’s decision will be the law of the land. 1. What’s the legal situation now? In India, marriage is governed by different laws tailored to the country’s religious groups; All limit marriage to male-female couples. But legal rights for LGBTQ people in India have been expanding over the past decade, led almost entirely by the Supreme Court. In 2014, it laid the groundwork by giving legal recognition to non-binary or transgender persons as a “third gender.” In 2017, it strengthened the right to privacy, and also recognized sexual orientation as an essential attribute of an individual’s privacy and dignity. In 2018, it decriminalized homosexual sex — overturning a British colonial-era law — and expanded constitutional rights for LGBTQ people. Last year, the court instituted protections for what it called “atypical” families. It’s a broad category that includes, for example, single parents, blended families or kinship relationships — and same-sex couples. The court said that such non-traditional manifestations of families are equally deserving of benefits under various social welfare legislation. 2. Where does the government stand? The ruling party, the BJP, opposed broadening the Hindu Marriage Act to include same-sex marriages in 2020, arguing that such unions are out of step with Indian values and culture. The Supreme Court has asked the government to officially weigh in on the current case; as
The first weekend after COVID-19 restrictions ended last month, dozens of young Chinese jostled in the dark at a heavy-metal concert in a tiny Shanghai music venue that reeked of sweat and hard liquor. It was the kind of freedom young Chinese had demanded in late November in protests against the zero-COVID policy that became the biggest outpouring of public anger in China since President Xi Jinping (習近平) took power a decade ago. After three years of lockdowns, testing, economic hardship and isolation, many of China’s Generation Z — the 280 million born between 1995 and 2010 — had found a new political voice, repudiating their stereotypes as either nationalist keyboard warriors or apolitical loafers. Pacifying a generation faced with near-record youth unemployment and some of the slowest economic growth in nearly half a century presents a policymaking challenge for Xi, who is just beginning a precedent-breaking third term. Improving young people’s livelihoods without abandoning the country’s export-led growth model poses inherent conflicts for a government that prioritizes social stability. This generation is the most pessimistic of all age groups in China, surveys show. While the protests succeeded in hastening the end of COVID curbs, the hurdles Chinese youth face in achieving better living standards will be harder to overcome, some analysts say. “As the road ahead for the youth gets narrower and tougher, their hopes for the future evaporate,” said Wu Qiang, a former politics lecturer at Tsinghua University who is now an independent commentator in Beijing. Young people no longer had “blind confidence and adulation” towards China’s leaders, he added. Some Chinese youth who spoke to Reuters reflected the sense of frustration. “If they didn’t change the policy, then more people would protest, so they had to change,” said 26-year-old Alex, who declined to give her last name for fear of retribution from the authorities,
Norman Mailer — when not boozily brawling, dosing himself with hallucinogenic drugs and serially fornicating — was a man with a sacred mission. He regarded himself as a prophet, bringing bad news to a society that had settled into consumerist complacency during the 1950s. Americans believe that they live in God’s own country; Mailer alerted them to “the possible existence of Satan,” who might be residing next door and quietly assembling a private arsenal for use on Judgment Day. Although Mailer looked up at the sky with “religious awe,” what he saw there was a mushroom-shaped cloud that he called “the last deity.” Humanity, he declared, was reeling towards self-destruction. Now that his centenary has arrived (he was born Jan. 31, 1923), I dare anyone — and that includes Richard Bradford, the author of this sensationalized canter through his life — to say that he was wrong. True, Mailer was an obnoxious loudmouth. In episodes that Bradford documents with slavering relish, he conducted literary disputes by butting his colleagues: “Once again words fail you,” drawled the coolly disdainful Gore Vidal after one such attack. Domestically, Mailer was a wife-beater and almost a murderer: taunted as a “faggot” by the second of his six spouses, he stabbed her with a penknife at a drunken party, just missing her heart. After an early infatuation with President Kennedy, whose fatal ride through Dallas in an open car he applauded as a moment of existentialist bravado, his politics lurched towards fascism. He commended Hitler for providing Germans with an outlet for their “energies,” although — as a man who bragged about his own bulbous, fizzily fertile “cojones” and the indefatigable piston of his penis — he pitied the Fuhrer for possessing only one testicle and having to rely on masturbation. Mailer intended to write the Great American
One of Patty Hogan’s more memorable moments in Taiwan was watching a kid quickly eat an entire rice triangle with seaweed at 7-Eleven. He then puked it up. “It was such a metaphor for life, art, consumerism, religion, politics and everything we love, but it was also really funny,” the American artist writes in her humorous piece “Walks and Talks” for the inaugural issue of Visions of Taiwan, an English-language comic anthology that celebrated its official release on Sunday. Containing seven stories employing a wide range of graphic styles and voices, the focus of this black-and-white, 48-page issue is about the Taiwan experiences of the foreign creators — who hail from Malaysia, Canada, the US and South Africa. There are a few requisite “how I ended up in Taiwan” tales, but there are also stories on how to get your scooter’s license. Although anthology editor Ray Hecht sees himself more of a writer, he’s been experimenting with graphic novels in the past few years, drawing inspiration from the indie spirit of eccentric American cartoonist Robert Crumb and the punk zine aesthetic. He published in 2019 the autobiographical Always Goodbye, and last year began approaching artists he’d met to contribute personal narratives to what became Visions of Taiwan. “There was a bit of a learning curve. Some people are just artists rather than storytellers and writers,” Hecht says. “I really had to beg people to give me a short script first. You may have an image in your mind, but it doesn’t translate to the page very well until you have experience [with comics].” Hecht’s contribution is about how he finally got his scooter license on the fourth attempt. “Every time I went there I learned a new rule,” he says. “I kept failing and starting over until it consumed me, and
Flowers and butterflies surround the scars left by the removal of Jacqueline van Schaik’s breasts, thanks to a new tattoo the cancer survivor says she treasures. “It’s magnificent,” exclaims an emotional Van Schaik, 56, looking at herself in the mirror at the end of the session at a tattoo parlor in the central Dutch city of Lelystad. “I don’t see the scars anymore. I only see this gem,” added the mother-of-one, who underwent a double mastectomy after being diagnosed with cancer in October 2020, followed by extensive chemo- and radiotherapy. Her tattooist, Darryl Veer, is part of a growing group of ink artists ready to help women love their bodies again after the traumatic experience of a mastectomy. Around one in seven women in the Netherlands develops breast cancer during their lifetime, Dutch health authority figures said. Breast removal is necessary in a third of these cases, according to a Dutch Web site specializing in cancer. Myriam Scheffer, 44, suffered the same fate. She too wanted a tattoo on her chest — “most probably a large bird spreading its wings” — but her scars have not yet healed enough. In the meantime, she decided to help others like her by setting up a foundation last year to offer free tattoos to women in the same situation. Van Schaik is the first-ever recipient. ‘BEAUTIFUL THING’ The idea of tattoos for breast cancer survivors already exists in the US and France, but Scheffer, who has an eight-year-old daughter, hopes to develop the initiative across Europe. Interested women can contact her from June on her foundation’s Web site, tittoo.org. There, they can meet the tattoo artists, plan the artwork and sessions, set for October to raise awareness for breast cancer screening. Thanks to her foundation, Italian and Swedish women will be able to do the same later this year, most likely in Florence and in
A painting by Edvard Munch that lay hidden in a barn alongside a version of The Scream, to keep it out of the hands of German soldiers, is to be sold at auction and the proceeds split with the family of the Jewish man who was forced to sell it when fleeing the Nazis. The monumental Dance on the Beach will be auctioned by Sotheby’s in London on 1 March and is estimated to fetch around ￡12 million to ￡20 million (US$14.7 million to US$24.5 million). Just over four meters wide, it is an enigmatic composition featuring dancing figures and two of the artist’s greatest loves — relationships that ended in tragedy and heartbreak. It is being sold by the family of Thomas Olsen, a Norwegian shipowner and Munch’s neighbor, who died in 1969. He had bought it in Oslo in 1934, just months after Curt Glaser, an eminent German academic, had been forced to sell it in Berlin. Both men had been close friends of the artist, who had painted portraits of their respective wives, Henriette Olsen and Elsa Glaser. Now, through Sotheby’s, their descendants have negotiated its forthcoming sale, putting right at least one wrong of the Nazis who, in the 1930s, included Munch among artists banned as “degenerate.” Dance on the Beach was part of a masterpiece of 12 major panels, which Max Reinhardt, the theater director, commissioned in 1906 for his avant-garde theater in Berlin. Munch designed sets for his stagings of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and Hedda Gabler and, in creating his theater in the round, Reinhardt asked him to paint a frieze that would surround the audience in a hall on the upper level, immersing them in what the artist called “images from the modern psyche.” When the theater was refurbished in 1912, the frieze was split up and Dance on the
There is a picture pinned beside my desk, a grid showing nine photographs of the same room. In the first photo there is a single bed, a clock, a lamp, two posters. It looks like maybe a student halls of residence — there is the feeling of homesickness and lack. In the second picture some rubbish sits on the carpet, the kind of stuff you’d tip out of a rucksack when repacking in a hurry. One poster is wonky. In the third, a chair has joined the room, and a pile of papers, and discarded clothes. In the fifth, a television is just visible beside a second chair, I think I see some speakers, a bundle of sheets. In the ninth and final photo, the bed is hidden beneath a mountain of clothes that touches the ceiling, a broken blind, a large bottle of something red and presumably fizzy. This is the Clutter Image Rating scale, a diagnostic tool designed to measure hoarding habits, and it has somehow become very important to me in the time since I printed it out at work and carefully carried it home inside a book, both as an image and as an evergreen template for the domestic horror stories of our lives. I referred to the scale this week when reading about “cluttercore,” an interiors trend that emerged in response to Marie Kondo’s throw-away-your-photos minimalism — a colorful, organized mess. In i-D, author Marianne Eloise wrote that cluttercore offers “a neat delineation between ‘hoarding’ and ‘collecting’… a curated kind of chaos.” It looks like: shelves and shelves of little plastic toys grinning out in shades of orange and pink and plants cascading down a bookcase and a gallery wall of mismatched picture frames and a hanging collection of trainers. “When someone comes into my home, they
The new one-year conscription program announced late last year by the administration of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) is already having an effect, though probably not the one intended. At my high school, a prep school for children from monied families who want their kids to do a university degree abroad, the male students are already scheming about how they will avoid serving, either by staying out until they are too old, or emigrating. Similarly, the perspicacious Taiwan commentator Ross Feingold observed in a conversation with journalists that because the wealthy will be able to avoid service, the one-year commitment is likely to fall largely on the working class. The Tsai administration, he argued, needs to work to make sure that does not happen. This is an old problem. In 2011 the laws were amended to make it impossible to avoid service by staying in school and avoiding graduation. “Ming Dao (明道), a Taiwanese actor and singer, has been a college student for 11 years and has changed four schools in that time,” the Taipei Times noted that year. Another famous star, Joseph Cheng (鄭元暢), spent seven years in college. Sons of prominent politicians were also said to have evaded military service. In the 2000 election it was briefly an issue for a couple of the candidates. Last year the government tightened the physical requirements to prevent other common dodges, such as putting on weight. Height restrictions were also relaxed. The government has responded to complaints about the increased length of service by raising the salary, and my students have noted this as a positive. However, the biggest problem the military service faces is that it’s a total waste of time for all involved. Conscripts do little and learn less. Hence, one way that the government can make it more tolerable (note I do not
Jan. 16 to Jan. 22 Titled “Confessions of a Father on Death Row,” (一個死刑犯父親的心聲), Tang Chen-huan’s (唐震寰) literary debut was one of sorrow and regret. It ran in the literary supplement of the China Daily News (中華日報) on Jan. 18, 1972, and marked the beginning of Tang’s literary career, which included several awards and a movie adaptation. He was the nation’s first inmate to pay taxes on book royalties. The well-liked former junior high school teacher was condemned for kidnapping the children of a businessman who had cheated him out of a large sum of money. Although he returned the kids unharmed, such crimes were punishable by death during the Martial Law era. “I wrote for nearly 20 hours a day, because I didn’t know if I would be dragged out and executed when the morning came,” he writes in a Xiangguang Magazine (香光莊嚴) article in 1996. “As long as I could still breathe, I wanted to write down all the words I wanted to say … I hoped that those in precarious situations, or those who sought revenge, could see me as an example and refrain from doing something they would regret forever.” Tang’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1975, and he was transferred to the Taichung Prison. By 1980, he had written 156 essays, short stories and novels, according to a Taiwan Panorama (台灣光華) article. When the organizers of the 1979 National Army Literature and Arts Award learned that their bronze medal winner was an inmate, they traveled to the prison and held for him a formal ceremony, a move that garnered much public attention. He won the award four more times. Tang was paroled in May 1985 after serving 12 years and eight months. At the press conference, he again
For Jim McClanahan, it all started in 2001 with one of China’s classic novels, Journey to the West (西遊記). Back then, the Ohio-native immersed himself in an English-language translation of the 16th-century epic. He’s since read bits of the story — which was inspired by a famous pilgrimage to India by the Buddhist monk Xuan Zang (玄奘, 602-664) — in Chinese. Around 2004, McClanahan’s obsession with the novel led him to buy an idol of the Monkey King, who’s also known as Sun Wukong (孫悟空) and is equipped with supernatural powers. The first statue he owned depicted the Monkey King wearing armor and seated on a tiger skin-draped throne. “It was magnificent,” McClanahan says. “Unfortunately, it was lost in a move several years ago.” REBEL DEITY McClanahan says that a key reason he collects idols of Sun Wukong is because “his religion is rare compared to other gods… it never received royal patronage in the past due to his penchant for rebelling against authority. So I feel it’s important to safeguard these statues for posterity.” He’ll likely donate his collection when he gets too old to care for them, he adds. McClanahan also uses the statues to educate “the legions of people abroad who are themselves obsessed with the Monkey King. Few of them are aware of his faith, and they’re always blown away when they learn this fact,” he says. McClanahan himself is not religious. The first icon McClanahan purchased after relocating to Taiwan in 2017 features Lei Gong (雷公, “Sire Thunder”) and Dian Mu (電母, “Mother of Lighting”). “I bought it because I was writing a paper at the time which explored the Hindo-Buddhist origins of a Garuda monster in Journey to the West. In the course of my research, I learned that Lei Gong’s modern bird-like appearance was likely influenced
En route to what some say is Miaoli County’s most impressive cluster of traditional buildings, my thoughts turned to food. I wasn’t hungry. Instead, as the bus made its way through the outskirts of Toufen Township (頭份), I noticed a road name as endearing as it is unique. Mifen Street (米粉街), which translates as “Rice Vermicelli Street,” is named for a type of ultra-thin noodle that’s often served stir-fried with slivers of pork, mushrooms and cabbage. Taiwanese rice vermicelli has long been associated with the cuisine of Hsinchu, the city that lies a dozen kilometers northeast of Toufen. But it seems that this neighborhood is also a center of mifen (米粉) production, as a quick Internet search reveals two nearby vermicelli factories. The bus trundled northward, and 1.5km later I stepped off. From Provincial Highway 13, I walked east down Lujhu Road (蘆竹路) and then along Lane 511 of Jhonghua Road (中華路511巷). I was still a couple of minutes’ walk from the heart of Lujhunan (蘆竹湳) when I came across a series of hand-painted movie posters. There’s never been a movie theater hereabouts, and I later found out that these posters were created simply to decorate the street and celebrate cinematic achievements. At least three quarters of the houses that stand between Lane 511 Jhonghua Road and a minor creek about 200m to the north are appealingly quaint. Tiled roofs are supported by wooden beams. External walls are made of brick, or of mudbrick faced with rectangular tiles. Interiors are divided by thin wattle-and-daub partitions. EXPLORING TRADITION Many of these homes are unoccupied, and several are utterly dilapidated. Exploring an alleyway so narrow it’d keep out obese trespassers, I gingerly stepped inside one abandoned shell. The detritus inside would give an extraterrestrial visitor a few clues as to life in Taiwan in the second half
Although Nature of Mother (無邊) features the first Taiwanese expedition to the south pole, it is hardly the main story. We do see some of the crew’s hardships and enjoy stunning shots of them trudging through the unforgiving, snow-blasted environment, but it’s really about director Yang Li-chou’s (楊力州) exploration of his inner demons and his relationship with his family. The audience never really gets to know the team members, their backgrounds and their motivations behind the perilous 15-day endeavor, where they have to literally sign their lives away. The entire purpose of the trip is not clearly stated, and the few scenes featuring individual crew members are disjointed, as their emotions and situation mostly serve to segue into Yang’s reflections. The serious mishaps, such as finding that they don’t have enough rations to finish the journey, are barely explained, nor how they eventually overcame the odds to make national history in December 2018. Even Yang losing his medication and equipment doesn’t seem like a big deal; we never learn why it happened or how he copes. This inward-looking, contemplative setting is evident from the beginning, however, as the film opens with Yang giving a spirited presentation about his career that moves the audience to tears. Something is not right, however, as his voice fades in and out, and the footage is full of glitches that briefly cut to shots of space and the moon. “But I don’t love myself,” he says in a voiceover. Yang is best known for his hot-blooded, inspirational movies of underdog success — from the indigenous teens in 2006’s My Football Summer (奇蹟的夏天) to 2011’s Young at Heart: Grandma Cheerleaders (青春啦啦隊). His more recent, 18-part Weirdo Series (怪咖系列) minidocumentaries are also uplifting celebrations of those who strive to blaze their own paths. Given the subject, one would expect
Eighteen offbeat and eccentric short films from 11 countries will be showing tomorrow at the inaugural Subtropical Independent Film Festival. “We show films that ask more questions than they answer,” festival director Barry Hall says. “We don’t want to limit it to purely avant garde and experimental films … basically any film that’s in some way unorthodox and wouldn’t maybe be seen by a mainstream audience.” The selections, which range from between five and 20 minutes long, are divided into two programs that are each shown twice tomorrow. The evening screenings will feature question and answer sessions with the two Taiwanese directors, as well as filmmakers dialing in from the Philippines and Denmark. “A lot of filmmakers won’t even submit to a first year film festival, but the average quality was much better than what I had expected,” Hall says. ■ Tomorrow, Program A shows at 1:30pm and 5:30pm, Program B shows at 3:30pm and 8pm, Like Space (萊客共享空間), 8F, 42 Xuchang St, Taipei City (台北市許昌街42號8樓) ■ NT$250 in advance, NT$275 at door ■ Visit www.facebook.com/SubTropicalIFF for more information
Could fossil fuel companies be forced to remove planet-heating carbon pollution from the atmosphere? Researchers argue in a new paper that would be a cheaper, fairer solution to the climate crisis. They suggest, in the research published Thursday, that the principle of extended producer responsibility (EPR) — a policy tool often used to deal with waste — should be extended to the oil, gas and coal industries. The study said impelling fossil fuel firms to use technologies to suck carbon from the air and bury it back in the ground would be a cost-effective decarbonisation strategy. “It would also mean that the principal beneficiary of high fossil fuel prices, the fossil fuel industry itself, plays its part in addressing the climate challenge,” said the paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The invasion of Ukraine by key oil and gas producer Russia has sent shockwaves through energy markets, resulting in prices surging and shining a spotlight on bumper fossil fuel industry profits. The study’s authors, including scientists and experts in Britain and the Netherlands as well as a former ExxonMobil manager, said the paper was a response to the energy crisis and potential lessons for the challenge of getting to net zero emissions. ‘GEOLOGICAL NET ZERO’ “We need to start a conversation on how we redirect this colossal amount of money that currently is simply injected into fossil fuel rents to addressing the climate problem,” co-author Myles Allen, a professor at Oxford University, told journalists. “We are going to have to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming before the world stops using fossil fuels.” To do that, he said, requires “geological net zero” — for every tonne of CO2 emitted by a fossil fuel, one tonne of the greenhouse gas would need to be sucked out of the atmosphere and permanently put back
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